


Son of Lycaon

by one_flying_ace



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Werewolves, because clearly I've lost my mind, but it's in-universe, but realistic werewolves, not sure when this is set
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-04
Updated: 2015-05-04
Packaged: 2018-03-29 00:21:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3875371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/one_flying_ace/pseuds/one_flying_ace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>From the ground Clarke can see that Amy was right; it’s not quite a wolf, but she doesn’t know what else to call it. The teeth are wrong, its spine elongated too much- it’s the stuff of nightmares, if Clarke had any room in her dreams for more horrors. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Son of Lycaon

Clarke wakes up in the dark to Raven leaning over her, shaking her shoulder. A howl from outside forestalls any questions.

“Get to the west fence,” Raven says, and Clarke nods, dressing fast as Raven heads back out. It’s almost pitch dark in the tent until her eyes adjust; she dresses on touch and habit, knife at her side, gun over her shoulder. She can hear people calling, the sound of booted feet running; then another howl, closer this time.

Bellamy is waiting for her at the west fence, with another couple of their camp, a younger guy and girl. “There’s at least three,” he says when Clarke joins them. “Amy spotted one earlier, on watch.”

The youngest of the group nods, looking terrified. “It’s okay,” Clarke says, reassuring. “What did you see?”

“It was like a wolf,” the younger girl says, shaking, one hand gripping white-knuckled on the pistol at her waist. “But there was something wrong with it.”

There’s no time for any more questions; the howls reach a peak, and something fast and low hits the fence, slamming into the wires. It snarls and darts back into the forest before any of them can get a shot off. Yells and gunfire from the gate have Clarke turning away for a split-second, and that’s when it attacks again, snapping one of the fence wires like it’s a weak branch.

Bellamy fires, swearing, but the thing is _fast_ , heading straight for Amy and the other boy, both rooted to the spot with fear.

“ _Hey!_ ” Clarke yells, and fires when it twists to come at her instead; her shot goes wide and then Bellamy’s body hits hers when it leaps at her, sending them both flat to the floor. The creature goes over their heads, a blur of dark fur and teeth, long claws inches from her head where Bellamy is pressing her down. A gunshot goes off close to her ear and she cries out in pain; the thing snarls and lands heavily, skidding round to come back at them, but Amy lifts her pistol and fires twice; it flinches and hesitates.

Someone up above angles a spotlight down onto them, and it freezes, half in the circle of bright light. From the ground Clarke can see that Amy was right; it’s not quite a wolf, but she doesn’t know what else to call it. The teeth are wrong, its spine elongated too much- it’s the stuff of nightmares, if Clarke had any room in her dreams for more horrors.

Bellamy is still covering her, keeping her flat, holding his gun awkwardly, stuck in a stalemate. It’s unsure of itself, snarling and trapped, but the moment he moves, Clarke knows it’ll attack. The younger boy is still frozen, but Amy suddenly snatches his knife, throws it at the creature. Through sheer luck it hits, point first, and Bellamy takes advantage of the moment,whips his gun up, fires again.

He hits it straight on, center mass, and it flinches back a few paces. Then it howls, long and sharp, and scrambles away, back through the broken fence and into the black forest.

It all takes nothing more than a few heartbeats.

\----------------------------------------

“Keep it clean,” Clarke tells Lenko, tieing off the bandage around his leg. “Ask someone to help if it hurts too much.”

Thanks, Clarke.” He pulls himself off the makeshift bed and hobbles out, nodding to Bellamy when the taller man holds the medical ten flap open for him.

“How’s it going?”

“Three seriously wounded, lots of scrapes.”

“How bad?”

Clarke gestures behind her, to where two of the medical beds are occupied. “Ewa has a broken leg, Chrin’s got concussion, and Helen got slashed across the face when the fence wire snapped.”

Bellamy nods, and something in Clarke warms at the fact that he takes it for granted she can fix their people; it’s a far cry from their early days as leaders. She follows when he opens the tent flap, letting in the dawn light, and he leads her down to the broken fence section. People are working on it, Raven supervising. She climbs down from the fence pole when Clarke waves to her.

“We’ll get it fixed before night,” she says when she’s close enough. Clarke looks around at the workers.

“Are you adding to it?”

Raven nods, pointing. “Adding another line of wire, moving the others, making it harder for anything to get through.”

“The one that attached here kept low,” Bellamy adds. “Kept to the ground; Monty says the one that hit the gate did the same.”

“No high jumps for these things. Maybe sharpened branches along the perimeter,” Raven adds, thoughtful. “It’d be a lot of extra work, but safer.”

“What about the generators,” Clarke asks.

“Working on it,” Raven says, with a shrug and a half-smile. “Can’t do everything at once, I’m not that good.”

“Yes you are,” Clarke tells her at once, and Raven laughs. Someone shouts for her, and she waves back. “Go fix everything.”

“You’re going out after them, aren’t you,” Raven says before she walks off, glancing between the two of them. Clarke looks to Bellamy; she’d followed him out of the tent on that assumption, but he hadn’t actually said it outright. Now he nods.

“Monty’s team scared theirs off with the flashlights, and we wounded ours,” he says, serious. “But I heard three of them; that’s two, at least, that might come back. And I want to see what happened to the one we injured.”

“They’re not easy to kill.” Raven rolls her eyes when Bellamy shrugs. “Don’t get caught out after dark,” she says, directing it to Clarke instead, “we don’t have the radios working yet. I gotta go, be safe, okay?”

“Always,” Clarke assures her. When Raven is out of earshot, bent over the generator they want to use to electrify their fence, she turns to Bellamy. “Let me get my pack.”

“Way ahead of you.” Bellamy takes a step over to where the fence is still gaping wide, picks up his pack, tosses hers over. “Let’s go.

Clarke resists the urge to argue, and ducks under the broken fence, following him out into the forest.

\----------------------------------------

In daylight she can rationalise the attack, tell herself that the things, no matter how frightening, have their weaknesses. But the further away from the camp they get, the quieter the forest is; there’s little birdsong, no herds of deer, and only once does she startle a rabbit-like creature. She mentions it to Bellamy.

“Frightened,” he says, and she realises they’re keeping their voices down. “The animals can sense a new predator, and they’re avoiding it.”

Clarke shivers. “They didn’t like the light,” she says, more to remind herself than tell him, but he nods. After a few more metres the fairly obvious trail of broken foliage they’ve been following ends; two spots of thick blood, then nothing. Clarke looks round, searching for a clue, anything to tell them where the creature went. When she turns back to Bellamy, he’s sliding down the bank of the river they’ve been walking more or less parallel to. He kneels, and when she leans over, there are prints in the soft mud; elongated pads, with sharp marks where its claws dug in.

There’s blood, too, on the mud, but not much.

“Once it started bleeding, it tried to hide its tracks.” That’s a level of intelligence that unsettles her, more than anything else.

“They’re most likely sensitive to light,” Bellamy says, still crouched, looking upstream. “But the one we injured might not have made it back to wherever they’re hiding out.” He climbs back up the bank and they move on, following the river now, guns held at readiness.

They find the body after another hour, roughly, lying face-down next to the flow of water. Bellamy gestures for her to stop, and they watch it for a moment; it doesn’t move, looking very dead, dried blood and dirt matted into dark, coarse fur. Clarke keeps her gun trained on its chest, body tense. “What are you doing,” she demands, when Bellamy slings his gun back over his shoulder, starts to creep forward.

“It’s dead,” he says, “it’s not a threat anymore, princess.”

It twists at the sound of his voice, the movement unnatural, and Clarke’s scream catches in her throat as it leaps for Bellamy. They go down hard, Bellamy swearing, the _thing_ snarling as it attacks him. She can’t get a clear shot at it, not without the risk of hitting Bellamy as well; she runs, swings the gun like a club and hears the crack of bone when it connects.

The thing rears back, snarling, reaching for her, and Bellamy slams his knife into its chest.

He scrambles backwards, away from it, but not fast enough. Dark blood gouts out of the wound, splattering thickly onto Bellamy and the forest floor. He grimaces and spits, collapsing onto his back with a groan.

“Don’t say a word.” His jacket is torn, the material around his right bicep wet with his own blood. Clarke drops to her knees next to him, ignoring the dead _thing_ , and reaches for his arm; she bites down her _I told you so_ , because he’s bleeding and pale under the blood splattered over his face.

“Give me your knife,” she demands. He hands it over without a word, and she cleans it off as best she can. She cuts off a piece of the bandage she keeps in her pack, and rinses the wound out with water from her canteen.

“How’s it look?” Bellamy asks.

“Not bad.” She wraps the bandage around his arm and ties it off as tightly as she can; he grunts in pain, but doesn’t flinch. When she sits back on her heels he twists his arm, running a hand over the wrapping. “It’s a clean bite, it’ll heal okay.”

“Thanks.”

She helps him up, and they look down at the body. It’s less animal-like now, and somehow looks- it looks more human, Clarke realises; as they watch its fur starts to shed, until its only clinging on in patches. Pale skin is revealed, filthy and covered in scars. Clarke steps back hurriedly when its legs shake, Bellamy’s arm coming out to shield her.

“What the _hell_.”

Clarke swallows hard. “It’s changing,” she says, pushing Bellamy’s arm down and away to move nearer, fascinated, even though every instinct demands she run. The leg bones audibly crack and then go still, followed by the spine, and the arms. “It looks more human.”

“This shouldn’t be possible,” Bellamy says, but he sounds weary more than anything else. “What the hell kind of radiation can make something shapeshift like that?”

“It’s more likely to be a disease,” Clarke says absently, using the point of her knife to move a leg, trying to straighten it out for a better look. Bellamy’s hand closes around her wrist.

“Want me to dissect it for you?”

“I’m only curious,” she protests, but when Bellamy raises his eyebrows she stands and puts the knife back into its sheath. “Do we take it back to camp?”

They look down at the twisted body for a moment, then; “help me drag it onto the rocks.” Bellamy leans down, sliding his hands under the thing’s shoulders. He nods towards the surrounding forest; “we’ll need dry wood, dry grass, anything that will burn.”

When Clarke bends to grab its ankles, Bellamy suddenly puts out a hand to stop her. “What?”

“Look at the face,” he says, twisting the neck round - and not gently. Clarke winces at the grating noise of bone against bone, but she looks. It’s almost human, like the rest of the body, but not quite; the teeth are too long and too sharp, and the face is warped, with a definite bestial appearance. “Whatever this is, we can’t let the others see it.”

“We can’t hide it from them,” Clarke argues, but the face, the malformed body, is making her nauseous. Bellamy watches her, patient; he knows he’s won this one before she bends down to grab the ankles again. “We can’t make a habit of this,” she says, and Bellamy snorts.

“How often do you think we’re going to fight something like this thing?”

“I don’t know. And neither do you,” she points out, when he smirks. “We don’t know what’s down here, not really. This might be the first of many.”

He doesn’t have anything to say to that. They gather dry grass and branches, enough to layer underneath and over the body, hiding it completely. Bellamy crouches down and strikes a spark, the kindling catching in seconds. They wait until the fire is blazing, moving back when the smell of charred flesh hits the air.

“We should go,” Clarke says, looking round. “The smoke is going to attract attention.”

\----------------------------------------

They’re almost back to camp when a party of Grounders confronts them, weapons raised.

Bellamy takes a step forward, angling himself in front of Clarke again; she bites down her annoyance and lets him, for now. His gun is out, ready, her own slung over her back; _sloppy_ , she thinks, knows Bellamy will have something to say about it later.

“I’m Ankha,” the one in front says. Clarke recognises her from a brief clash the week before; not hostile, but not yet friendly either. She lacks the arrogance that sets Clarke’s teeth on edge, but she’s confident- as she should be, her party outnumbers them three-to-one. “We’re tracking a trio of wolves; have you seen anything?”

She asks the question smoothly, but there’s a split-second hesitation before she says wolves.

“We were attacked last night,” Clarke says, ignoring Bellamy’s sigh and the sideways look he throws her. “There were three of them.”

There’s a tightening of grips on guns, the hunting party shifting. Several are turned to face out into the forest, Clarke notices; rear guards, even now. She keeps herself still, calm, watches the glance Ankha shares with a short Grounder to her left; he’s carrying two guns, and a spear fastened to his back, a sneering expression in his face.

“Do you have any injured? The creatures, they’re strong, and they favour attack with their teeth.”

“Nobody got bitten,” Bellamy lies. He looks down at Clarke, silently asking her to back him up; “we have some injuries, but no bites.”

“One broken leg,” Clarke confirms, hoping she sounds believable. “And two head wounds; we held them off, they never got close enough to bite anyone.”

“We should kill them, just to make sure,” the short Grounder snarls. Ankha ignores him, her own weapon lowering to aim at the floor between the two of them. There are feathers in her hair, angry reds and oranges.

“We have no injuries like that,” Bellamy lies again. “We wounded one of them, tracked it this morning and found it dead.”

“The body?”

Bellamy shrugs. “Burnt it. Wasn’t the kind of thing we wanted to leave lying around.”

Ankha’s eyes narrow. “Hold,” she suddenly says, when the tension between the groups has reached almost unbearable heights. “ _Hold_ ,” she repeats forcefully, throwing an arm out to push down the gun of the trigger happy Grounder to her left. He lowers it, eventually.

“What was it?” Clarke steps up to Bellamy’s side the moment the guns aren’t pointing at them. “It looked human, afterwards-”

“They aren’t,” Ankha interrupts, several of her party nodding. “Some of them might have been, once, but not any more.”

“Werewolves,” Clarke says, disbelieving. Ankha shrugs; some of her party spit on the ground.

“That’s what we call them. They have different names in other clans, but they’re the same creatures.”

“You said they attack with their teeth,” Bellamy says, perfectly casual, like he isn’t lying through his own. Clarke’s heart pounds, knees trying to go weak at what might have happened had she not made him let her bandage the wound. “Is there a reason for that?”

The short Grounder shifts, wary, but his gun stays lowered. “Yes. It’s how they infect you.”

Clarke swallows hard. “Being bitten- it’ll turn you into one of them?”

Ankha nods. “They haven’t attacked us in a long time; years ago we blocked the mountain pass they used to use, trapped them on the other side. They had plenty of food up there, but recently we’ve had sightings of them. Something has driven them to find another way down to us.”

“Cheerful thought,” Clarke says, striving for calm. “What’s nastier than those things?”

“We are,” Bellamy says, smirking, and for fuck’s sake, Clarke could slap him sometimes. He glances down at her, like she’d said it out loud, and the smirk gets bigger when she rolls her eyes.

“Is there good way to kill them?” She asks, ignoring him. “We shot them, but it took more bullets when we can afford.”

“Knives,” another of the Grounders says, holding her own wicked-looking blade up. “They’ve got tough skin, and they heal real fast. But cut their throats and they bleed out in seconds.”

“Or cut their head off,” adds the short Grounder, and several of them nod. “Either way,” he adds, with a nasty grin, “you’ve gotta get in close.”

Clarke closes her eyes briefly. _Of course_. Because nothing else is easy, so why would this be.

\----------------------------------------

Back in camp, Bellamy strides off before Clarke can pull him to one side and check his arm; that’s probably the point, she thinks, staring at his back. She goes to find Raven instead, ignoring the rising worry; the other woman is still working on the generator, but she steps to one side when Clarke motions her over.

“The injuries from last night,” Clarke asks, “any bites, scratches, anything that broke the skin?” She hands over her canteen when Raven gestures, frowning. Raven takes a drink, shakes her head, clearly confused; she knows damn well that Clarke checked everyone over before going tracking, but she plays along, aware like Clarke that several of the younger ones are listening in.

“Just what you know about, and some scratches from running around like idiots in the dark that no one wanted to bother you with, but nothing from those things. Why?”

Clarke keeps her voice even. “We don’t have any immunity to Earth diseases yet,” she says, and Raven’s eyes narrow. “I want to keep an eye on anyone with injuries, just in case.”

“Okay,” Raven says slowly, clearly not buying it. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing. Nothing yet,” she amends, when Raven’s frown deepens. “We’re dealing with it,” she says quietly, knows Raven will understand the slight emphasis on _we’re_. Raven eyes her for a moment, clearly weighing up what she wants to say against the fact that they’re being watched still.

“Okay,” she says eventually. She reaches out to pull Clarke into a tight one-armed hug; keeping her voice low, she speaks into Clarke’s ear. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“When do I ever,” Clarke replies, hugging her tight, glad of the contact. Raven pulls back, laughing.

“Twice a day, since you landed.”

“Gotta keep you on your toes.” She’s glad, just like she always is, that Raven is so smart. She doesn’t need to ask, because she’s already figured it out; maybe not the werewolf part, but she knows something’s up, and that’s all Clarke needs to say. Raven will help her, if she asks.

For her sake Clarke hopes she won’t need to; the less people who know exactly what’s going on, the safer they’ll all be.

\----------------------------------------

For three days, the nights are quiet, the extra guards reporting nothing out of the ordinary. The keep busy repairing and strengthening the fences, meeting with Grounders willing to talk instead of fight, hunting to boost their food supplies. On the fourth day they start work on a circle of sharpened stakes around the camp, dug into the ground below the lowest level of the fence.

Bellamy works twice as hard as anyone else; whenever Clarke turns round he seems to be there, moving sharpened stakes, directing the removal of soil, in the long ditches himself, digging hard. Clarke had organised people into shifts first thing that morning, concerned about dehydration and the fact that none of them spent much time before hitting the ground doing physical labour this tough.

Towards the end of the afternoon Bellamy stumbles carrying a load of stakes, and Clarke takes her chance. “Time for a break,” she tells him, too aware of the people pretending not to watch them, waiting for him to argue.

“It was nothing,” he insists, reaching for the stack of stakes again. Clarke grabs them first, slides them away towards someone else, glaring at him.

“You want to kill yourself working this hard, fine.” For a moment she stares him down, then;

“I’ll take a break,” he snaps, and walks off towards his tent without a backward glance.

Clarke follows him back to his tent, ignores the warning look when he sees her behind him, and ducks under the flap. He’s drinking from his canteen like he hasn’t seen water in days, like he hasn’t been drinking every time he’s taken a moment to pause.

“How long,” Clarke demands. She reaches out to touch his forehead, glaring when he steps backwards, out of reach. “How _long_ , Bellamy.”

“Since yesterday,” he finally admits, and stops trying to dodge when she leans up again. He’s hot to the touch, too hot, and when he reaches up to brush her hand aside, there’s a faint tremor along his arm. “Feels like I’m burning up.”

“That’s why you’ve been working so hard,” she realises. “You were trying to sweat it out.”

“Thanks,” he says dryly. “That was the idea, yes. But I don’t think it’s like a regular fever.”

“Show me your arm.”

“Clarke-”

“I’m not arguing. Show me, or I’ll cut your shirt off myself.”

“Easy, princess, all you had to do was ask.” He tries to smirk, but it’s weak, and he pulls his shirt off without any more argument. He’s changed the bandage, Clarke notes; it’s tied differently to how she does it. The fabric is clean, which would usually be a good sign, and when she unwraps it, Bellamy shows no sign of discomfort.

What Clarke sees when she unwinds the final strip makes the hairs on the back of her neck rise.

The wound is healed, apart from a red-raw line where the edge of the bite used to be. She presses her fingers onto it, gently at first, then when Bellamy looks over his shoulder and lifts an eyebrow, she presses harder.

“Does that hurt?”

“No. Should it?”

“Don’t be an ass.” She takes his bicep in both hands, probes the skin with her thumbs, tries to ignore the shift of muscle and hot skin. “You were injured three days ago, there’s no way it could have healed this much yet.”

Bellamy drops his head, looks away. “I know. The Grounders were right, it infected me with something. I can feel it.”

Clarke moves a hand to press against the back of his neck, frowning at the heat. “You’re burning up.”

“Been trying to keep my temperature down, drink plenty of water,” and Clarke smiles at that, because she’s given him that same advice a dozen times, and it figures this is the one where he listens. But then- the thing in the forest, the look on the Grounders faces when Ankha asked about bites.

“You can’t be here when it happens,” she says, thinking out loud. “There’s got to be somewhere we can-”

Bellamy interrupts, tiredness gone, straightening up under her hands. ”There’s no _we_ , Clarke. I got bitten, _I’ll_ deal with it.”

“I’m not letting you do this alone. There’s gotta be something we can do - the Grounders know about those things, there might be a cure-” Bellamy laughs, mirthless and cold. He pulls away from her hands, folds his arms, gives her the stop-arguing-now look that irritates the fuck out of her.

“Look, princess, at some point this is going to happen, and I’m not going to be human any more. So if you want to help me, stay out of my way, so I can’t kill you.”

Clarke is adamant about this. “You’re not going to kill anyone, Bellamy. We’ll figure something out.”

\----------------------------------------

When Bellamy leaves his tent the next morning Clarke is waiting for him, her pack over one shoulder. For a minute she thinks he’s going to argue, and she stands her ground, meeting his eyes squarely. They can’t argue without waking people up, and she knows he won’t risk that. It’s not even dawn yet when they leave the camp, heading out into the forest and away.

Bellamy leads the way in silence, moving quickly, obviously with a destination in mind. Clarke concentrates on keeping up, determined not to get left behind; they’re in this together, all of it, even the ugly parts. Especially the ugly parts.

Eventually he slows down, waiting for her at the top of a low rise. She scrambles up the last few meters, trying not to show how winded she is.

“Think that’ll do?”

Clarke scans the landscape in front of them. After a moment she picks out a structure, mostly hidden by the forest. “Another bunker?"

Bellamy nods. “One of our hunting parties found it two days ago. It’s far enough away from camp for them to be safe, and Chrin said it’s intact.

“Then let’s go.”

It takes them a until mid-afternoon to reach the structure, hacking their way through thick foliage that grows across the bottom of the valley. It’s almost a micro-climate, the air dense and humid; Clarke is sweating before they’re halfway down into the valley, so she can’t imagine how Bellamy must feel, already starting to burn up from the inside.

The bunker is on higher ground, the air inside still warm but drier, no vegetation creeping inside; that’s promising, Clarke thinks, it should be structurally sound. It’s got a thick metal door, wedged open with dirt and rust. Bellamy examines it.

“I think we can force it closed. It opens outwards, so if we jam it with something, you’ll be okay.”

Clarke shivers, realises he’s talking about something getting _in_. “You can’t be serious,” she snaps, “you can’t shut me in here and think you can do this out there on your own-”

“I won’t be out there,” he interrupts, holding up a hand when she opens her mouth to argue, and says, “no, think about it, we only killed one of them, Clarke.”

“But they left, we haven’t seen or heard them since.”

“Monty said his party tracked them heading north,” Bellamy admits, “but they might circle back round to attack the camp if they think we’ve dropped out guard, or if-” The words hang unspoken in the air, _or if something draws them_.

After a tense pause, Clarke drops her pack, and moves past Bellamy, to the back of the room. A row of doors opens out onto several small rooms, some of them still full of shelves. She finds buckets, packets of food rations that are probably still okay. In one room there’s a goldmine of unopened boxes, full of matches and candles; she drags them into the main room for later.

A crash from one of the other rooms has her running back, to find Bellamy in the centre of a destroyed rack of shelves.

“What happened?”

“I did. Here, help me with this.” Together they dismantle the shelves into components, and Bellamy experiments with one of the doors; they all open outwards, that’s the easy part, but after some hard work and bent metal they manage to figure out how to block the door from the inside as well.   

“Those things were smart,” Bellamy says, like he isn’t maybe a few hours from becoming one, “but they didn’t have hands.”

“You mean opposable thumbs,” Clarke adds, just to see his mouth twitch when he tries not to smile. The fittings are crude, but strong; even both of them can’t open it, one on either side of the door, pushing and pulling with all their strength. “It’ll have to do,” she says eventually, winded.

They spend a while preparing, clearing out the junk from Bellamy’s chosen room - prison, really - setting up a bed for him and one for Clarke in the main room, at a safe distance the door. There’s a grill in the base, covered by strong wire; Bellamy tests it, but it holds firm even when he kicks it, not even shaking.

When it starts getting dark they heave the bunker door shut and use more of the gutted shelves to block it, until it’s as strong a barrier as they can manage. Bellamy insists on checking Clarke’s gun over again, even though she’s done it twice, and tells him so; in the end he snaps at her, and she stalks off to set candles everywhere, ready for the darkness.

When Bellamy sets the weapon aside she can see that his hands are shaking, and there’s sweat beading at his temples. A full canteen is next to him, two more in the little room, but he hasn’t drunk anything in a few hours; it won’t help at this point, Clarke knows. He looks up, catches her eye.

“If you have to,” he says, and Clarke hears herself make a small, shocked noise when she realises what he means, holding the gun out to her. “Clarke, you have to.”

She drops to her knees next to him, ignoring the weapon, and hugs him tightly. The gun clatters to the ground next to them when his arms sweep up to hold her close. Then he pulls away, the loss of his overheated skin making hers prickle in the bunker air, gone cool as darkness has fallen; Clarke picks the gun up, aware that unlike his, her hands don’t shake. “I will,” she promises, because she owes him that much.

The door clangs shut behind him, and they fix the rough barriers into place. It doesn’t move a millimeter when they’re done.

“Try to get some sleep,” Bellamy says, muffled by the door. Clarke smiles into her makeshift pillow, and closes her eyes against tears.

\----------------------------------------

It’s pitch black when Clarke wakes, heart pounding in fright. For a long moment she stays frozen, eyes wide, seeing nothing. Then there’s a noise, a long moan of pain from the small room to her left.

She turns her head, slowly, looking towards the door and the low grill, and whispers, “Bellamy?” At first there’s no response, and she’s just starting to think she imagined it, when she hears her name. She sits up, pulls the gun across her thighs. “Bellamy, are you okay?”

Out of the darkness comes another sound, a rough, raw, aching noise that she realises is Bellamy _laughing_.

“No, I’m not. It’s burning me, Clarke, it _hurts so much_ -” He screams, then, and Clarke knows she will never forget the hours ahead for as long as she lives.

By the time the screams stop she’s shivering, hands white-knuckled and aching from her grip on the gun in her lap. She’s managed to light a few candles, hands shaking so much she could barely strike a match, and there’s enough light for her to see the door, but the room behind it is still in total darkness. Her eyes ache from staring at the little grill, but she can’t sleep now, not with the image of what might be on the other side, or with Bellamy’s screams still ringing in her ears.

A noise has her frozen again, a tiny sound in the silent bunker, what she imagines the scrape of claws on concrete sounds like. Clarke shifts the gun, reaches out to light another candle.

The eyes that are suddenly looking back at her from behind the grill aren’t right; they’re too low, too wide-set, but they’re the right colour. She realises, cold sweat sliding down her spine, that this is - was - Bellamy, and it’s watching her.

Clarke realises she’s humming, doesn’t know when she started, but it helps her feel a little less paralysed with terror. The eyes continues to watch her, and she hums until her throat hurts, pauses only to take a drink of water before moving on to singing an old lullaby she remembers from when she was tiny. The thing that used to be Bellamy watches, blinking slowly, and she gets the sense it’s listening.

She’s had to light several more candles, the others guttering and fading, when the eyes vanish. Clarke’s voice dries in her throat. A long, low growl reaches her ears, her hands clenching around the gun again, and then there’s a choked-off noise, like a sob.

“Clarke?”

“ _Bellamy_.” She scrambles forward, but not too close, and she takes the gun with her. Her hands shake as she lights another candle, holds it as close to the grate as she dares. Bellamy is crouched against the opposite wall, looking- “You look like hell,” she says, but her voice shakes as badly as her hands.

“I feel like hell,” he says, voice scraped raw. “It’s not over yet. Clarke, can you- can you keep singing? It’s helping me remember-”

He shudders, curling in on himself. In the weak light Clarke can see that his hands are wrong, elongated and covered in thick fur, claws clattering on the concrete floor when he falls forward with a hoarse scream. She moves back and away, onto the makeshift bed, and waits out the screams again.

This is her life now, she realises, and slaps a hand over her mouth before the hysterical laughter can force its way out. When the bunker is quiet, apart from harsh breathing from the smaller room, she starts singing again.

\----------------------------------------

Dawn breaks outside, weak light filtering in through the tiny reinforced bunker windows. Clarke aches everywhere, hands cramping when she sets the gun to one side. Her voice has gone, pretty much; she doesn’t know how long she spent singing, and then talking, but it has to have been half the night. Once she thought she heard a howl outside, but nothing tried to get in, and after Bellamy turned the second time she got used to the snarls.

She’s exhausted, but she crawls forwards as soon as there’s enough light to see into the little room. There’s no movement from inside until she gets close enough to see properly; Bellamy is stretched out on the floor, and from what she can see, he’s human. Battered and bruised, his shirt and pants a tattered heap in one corner, but he’s breathing, and still her Bellamy.

She taps on the door, and his head moves, turning heavily until she can see his face. “Hey. Still alive?”

He laughs weakly, painfully, rolling onto his side with awkward movements. “I’m not sure. Ask me again in a few hours.”

“How do you feel?” Clarke stares at him as he sits up slowly, cataloguing all the new bruises and the signs of strain. He’s not shaking any more, she notes, and his skin doesn’t have the slick of fever sweat any more. “You look better.”

“I feel- different.” He looks down at his hands, stretching the fingers out wide. “I had claws.”

“Yeah.”

“Did I try to…” He trails off, looks at Clarke through the grill. She shakes her head. “Good. That’s- good.”

Clarke sets the gun aside and pushes herself up, fumbling with the barricade of ruined shelves they’d used to secure the door. She throws them to one side, the metallic clatter painfully loud; when she’s done, she sinks down again, leaning against the door. “Bellamy?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Clarke waits while he eases himself up, and if she’s exhausted, he looks twice as bad. “I feel like the Ark landed on me.”

“You don’t look much better either.”

He snorts, then coughs hard. Clarke winces. “I appreciate the sympathy.”

“Any time.”

Waiting for him to unblock the other side of the door is excruciating, but eventually the last pieces fall away and the door moves, almost overbalancing Clarke where she’s leaning against it. She stands up to pull as Bellamy pushes, and then she can hug him, holding on as hard as she can, his arms around her so tight she can barely breathe. She doesn’t give a shit.

When her knees start to give out, and he’s leaning as much on the doorframe as on her, she maneuvers them towards the bed she’d set up. It didn’t get much use during the night, but now they collapse onto it, wrapping themselves up in the blankets and falling asleep almost instantly.

\----------------------------------------

Clarke wakes gradually, slowly becoming aware that she’s hungry, and Bellamy is stroking her hair. It’s been a few hours, she reckons; the light is stronger, brighter around them. They’re tangled up in each other, and for a while she savours the warmth, the feeling of someone holding her comfortably.

“There were werewolves in Ancient Rome,” Bellamy suddenly says, voice quiet, still hoarse and rough. “Lycans, they called them back then.”

“Why?” Her own voice is the same; it hurts to talk, but she’d rather that than any other kind of hurt, given what might have happened.

“After Lycaon. Zeus turned him into a wolf for daring to serve the gods human flesh at a feast.”

“More cannibalism, just what we need.”

Bellamy’s chest shakes underneath her as he laughs, still quiet. “Clarke, this could be bad. Really bad. The myths all connect werewolves to the full moon, but this isn’t like that.”

“This is a nuclear war and radiation,” Clarke reminds him, “not your Ancient Romans. We’ll figure something out."

“You say that a lot, princess.”

“And we always do.” Bellamy doesn’t say anything to that, and after a while Clarke dozes again, nestled against him, his hand still stroking her hair until it slips away and his breathing evens out.

Next time she wakes, nature calls and she’s too hungry to stay in their makeshift bed. She unblocks the door long enough to take care of the first, pulls rations out of their packs to stop the hunger pains in her stomach. Bellamy wakes when she’s just finished eating, downing a canteen of water and slipping outside himself.

“Here,” she says, “you need to eat.” There’s bread they traded for, and some kind of cheese, but Bellamy goes straight for the meat. They brought enough for three people for a week; she’d thought that he’d be hungry, if he made it through, but he eats like he hasn’t seen food for a month.

When he’s drunk another half a canteen, there’s some colour back in his face. He pulls the gun to him and methodically checks it over while Clarke tidies up. “Is it safe for me to go back?” He asks suddenly, and Clarke pauses, sits back.

“The fever’s broken,” she says, because lying tangled up with him means she knows exactly what his temperature is like now, and there’s no hint of the unnatural heat. “And your hands aren’t shaking.”

“I do feel better,” he admits. “Still pretty shit though.”

“You survived,” Clarke tells him firmly.

“I could have hurt you-”

“But you _didn’t_.”

“I’m a monster now.”

“No,” Clarke snaps, twisting to face him and coming onto her knees, looking him directly in the eyes. “ _No_. You’re not a monster.”

“I can _feel it_.” Bellamy presses a hand to his chest, expression intense. “In here. It’s still there, Clarke. If I don’t get it under control, I could- _turn_ into one of those things in the middle of camp.”

“Then we work on your control,” Clarke says adamantly. “You’re good at that.”

They don’t talk after that, packing up and leaving by mutual unspoken consent. The walk back takes longer, both of them still tired and shaken. Bellamy is twitchy too, and Clarke wonders about the myths she’s heard, wonders if maybe he’s not as human as he looks any more, even if he doesn’t look like the things that attacked them.

“What do we tell the others,” Clarke suddenly wonders, when they’re within sight of the camp. She hadn’t thought that far ahead, more focused on not letting Bellamy leave alone, and then on the nightmarish wait through the night. “We can’t tell them what happened; we don’t want them to panic.”

“We don’t say anything.”

“We have to tell them some-”

“They’re going to think the obvious.” Bellamy cuts her off, with almost his usual smirk. “Not that I went and turned into a werewolf."

“Probably for the best,” Clarke says, once she finds her tongue, and hopes her cheeks aren’t too red.

\----------------------------------------

Bellamy’s control, Clarke realises over the next two weeks, is astounding. It takes a few days for him to settle down and stop flinching at every loud noise, but then that’s it, back to normality. If she didn’t know what he was struggling with, she doubts she’d be able to tell.

Once they’ve got a few good night’s sleep and recovered, Clarke ambushes him on the way back from a hunting expedition. “We need to talk,” she says, and waits out the tired look he gives her. “My place or yours?"

“People are going to start to talk, princess,” he says, smirking, but he leads the way to his own tent.

“They’re already talking,” Clarke shoots back, because they are, but she can deal; it’s not like it bothers her. She’s thought about it a few times - more, weirdly, since they spent the night in the bunker together. But right now they have jobs to do, people to lead, and now a werewolf in the room to deal with.

“What is it, Clarke?” He sits down on the edge of his bed, wiping the sweat off his face with a rag. She perches on a supply box opposite, watching him.

“I’ve been thinking,” and his eyebrows go up; she ignores the subtle challenge. “Do you feel different?”

Bellamy’s jaw tightens. “I told you, I’m fine. I’m not going to snap and kill any of our people.”

“That’s not what I meant. I don’t think you’re cured; it’s not like an ordinary infection. If it was, the Grounders with Ankha wouldn’t have wanted to kill us just in case.”

After a long moment, staring each other down, Bellamy leans back, bracing himself on his arms. Very nice arms, that Clarke pointedly doesn’t notice. “You think I’ll go through that again.”

“I don’t know,” she admits, “and it’s not like we can ask any of the Grounders for advice, they’d kill you on sight, and everyone else too probably. But you did it once; you can do it again.”

“Your optimism is encouraging,” Bellamy says dryly. “So what did you mean by different?”

She shrugs. “You changed into one of those things, completely. I’m wondering if any of the changes are permanent.”

Bellamy sits up, holds out his hands to her. “No claws, princess. And no sharp teeth either, to bite you with.”

“Don’t be an ass.” She’s still smiling though, a blush trying to work its way onto her cheeks; from the look on Bellamy’s face, he can tell what she’s thinking. Clarke clears her throat. “Let me see your arm, I want to see how the injury is.”

He keeps smirking, lifting his eyebrows but saying nothing, and lets her check the original wound. Like she assumed, there’s nothing to see; his bicep is healed, unmarked by even a scar. “Show me your ribs,” Clarke demands, moving to stand in front of him.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Your ribs.” Clarke sighs in exasperation when he doesn’t move. “I know you were injured sparring with Lincoln this morning, I need to see.”

“Pushy,” he comments, but strips off his shirt before she can say something sarcastic back. For a moment she’s confronted with _skin_ and _muscles_ , and her whole body reminds her exactly how long it’s been since she had sex, of any kind. Clarke shakes her head and reaches out, testing the place on his ribcage where she saw Lincoln land a hard blow.

“Will this take long?”

“Don’t tell me you’re cold,” she says absently, focusing on the injury- or lack of it. There’s minimal bruising, but she was sure Bellamy had cracked a rib at least, and there’s no swelling at all. When she probes harder with her fingertips, Bellamy makes a small, choked-off noise. “Did that hurt?”

“No. But you’re- you’re very close, Clarke.” He’s staring off above her head, and she realises his heart is beating fast underneath her hand. “And you might- you might be right about the extra senses.”

“Oh yeah?” She’s fascinated, despite the distracting - and obvious - tension between them. “Like what?”

“Like I can _smell_ you.”

Clarke’s hand tightens on Bellamy’s side and he groans, leaning down, so close, and it’s going to be _so good_ , she can tell, so of course that’s when they’re fucking interrupted.

To be fair, Clarke tells herself later, a broken arm is important enough for Jasper to burst into Bellamy’s tent, one hand over his eyes, promising that he hasn’t seen anything and can Clarke “please come to the medical tent, we need you? Unless you’re in the middle of-”

She feels she was justified in pulling Jasper’s hand away from his eyes and dragging him out of the tent, as much to freak him out as to get away from Bellamy’s laughter.

\----------------------------------------

That night she gets herself off thinking about the look in Bellamy’s eyes, the idea that he could smell how turned on she was just by being that close to him. The potential there is incredible; Clarke widens her legs, moves her fingers just so, wonders if she could create a feedback loop to drive them both insane.

He’d been turned on by the smell of her, she could tell; his pupils had blown until his eyes were almost all black, and as soon as she’d stepped forward his heart rate had increased, the skin under her fingers heating up. All because he could smell her- and she hadn’t been half so wet as some other times she’s been near him.

But that was _before_.

She muffles her moans with an arm when she comes, and then manages to finish a second time wondering if Bellamy can hear her - if he’s listening for her sounds. It’s intense and amazing and _not enough_.

\----------------------------------------

Three days later, Bellamy rips a Grounder’s arm off in the middle of a fight, and the look on his face almost makes Clarke burst into hysterical laughter. They were walking back to camp from a visit to one of the friendly settlements, until a faction who definitely don’t want to work with the Sky People decided to ambush and attack them.

Her own people don’t seem to notice, and the other attackers are beaten by that point; they melt back into the forest, leaving the few dead behind. Clarke’s people are battered and bruised but all alive, thankfully.

“Was that intentional?” she asks later, once their people are safe and they’re moving again.

“No,” he answers, jaw clenched. His clothes are covered in blood. “Did anyone else see?”

“I don’t think so.” They walk swiftly in silence for a time, until Clarke’s need for answers overwhelms his obvious reluctance to talk about it.

“Did you feel like you were going to turn again?” Bellamy shakes his head. “So it was just a reaction to the situation?” _Nod_. “Could you do it again?” _Shrug_. “You could be more helpful about this, you know.”

“I don’t know what to say, Clarke!” Bellamy snaps, and stops dead. Monty walks straight into his back, and for a moment they stand side by side, looking at the group looking at them. Someone towards the back stage-whispers, “mom and dad are fighting again,” and Bellamy turns on his heel, storms ahead along the trail back to camp.

\----------------------------------------

They test it after that, because the medic in Clarke needs to know what Bellamy can do now, what the impact on his body might be. The leader in her is already seeing possibilities and potential; Bellamy, for his part, goes along with it for the second reason. Any edge they can find, even if it’s an infection from a nuclear war-created werewolf, is still an edge.

“Go.”

“Red, blue, red again, green, black, green, blue, and- white.”

Clarke grins, knows she looks smug, but hell, so does he. “Correct.” That morning she’d got Raven to keep Bellamy busy inside, and hiked across to some high ground opposite the camp to set up a series of fabric scraps on poles; Bellamy had just looked over almost a mile and told her the exact colour order.

“Admit it, I’m good.” Bellamy stretches out on the forest floor at her feet, looking up at Clarke where she’s sat on a fallen tree. “Any more experiments you want to do to me, princess?”

“Plenty,” she says, and smiles sweetly when his eyes narrow. They’re doing this, she’s decided, they’re flirting and teasing and at some point, she’s going to rip his clothes off - but until she knows for sure that he won’t rip her to actual pieces in return, they’re sticking with the sexual tension. The almost unbearable sexual tension, by this point; even Octavia has commented, to her unspoken disgust. “So far we’ve got-”

Bellamy ticks them off on his fingers. “Eyesight, reflexes, speed, and strength.”

Clarke nods, cheeks warming when he lists the last experiment. She’d tested his strength in as many ways as she could think of, until he’d got pissed off and lifted her over his head like she weighed nothing. “Don’t forget scent,” she adds.

Bellamy’s eyes flick to her and away, fast. It’s very satisfying.

Then he sits up, looking at her, and deliberately sniffs. Heat pools low in her stomach, and she has to press her legs together, because _shit_ , yeah, she’s teasing him, but he’s just as good at it. Bellamy’s eyes narrow, and he sniffs again; Clarke stands up, brushing herself off.

“We should head back, we’ve done enough experimenting for today.” She’s aiming for casual, but her voice shakes at the end, and Bellamy is ignoring her anyway. He stands up, not quite looming, but close enough. She takes a step back.

“Your arm-” Bellamy reaches out faster than she can move away, and his hand closes gently over her wrist. “You’re hurt.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“I can smell the blood.”

“I could be on my-” Clarke blushes hard when Bellamy shakes his head, and wow, that’s a whole new kind of invasion of privacy. “We are never, _ever_ mentioning that you can smell when I’ve got my period.”

“Believe me, I’m not gonna mention it.” He shifts his loose grip on her arm. “But you’re injured, and we _are_ talking about that.”

“It’s nothing,” she starts, but Bellamy is already sliding her sleeve up. The ring of bruises is stark against her skin, already blue. “I’m fine,” she amends, because she is, but when Bellamy looks up she knows it’s not enough. “It was one of the ones who attacked us yesterday, he grabbed me, that’s all.”

“I’ll rip his spine out through his nose,” he says calmly, and Clarke’s heart thuds heavily when she realises that not only would he do exactly that, he probably _can_ do that now.

“No, you won’t.” Clarke steps in closer, absolutely doesn’t get even more turned on by the way he scents her again immediately. “Their settlement is going to help us, you’re not going to kill one of them over a few bruises.”

Bellamy lifts his eyes to the sky, sighing heavily, and when he looks back down it’s all human, nothing else. “Clarke, he _hurt_ you. There is nothing, no trade, no military assistance, _nothing_ , worth you getting hurt for. Or anyone else either.”

“I broke his nose,” Clarke offers, grins when Bellamy looks startled, then laughs loudly. “It’s not like I let him get away with it, I just don’t think he needs to die."

“Okay, okay.” Bellamy takes his hand away from her arm, holds them up in mock surrender. “But if he does, you know where I am, right?”

“Always,” Clarke says, still smiling, relieved. “You’re a permanent pain in my ass.”

\----------------------------------------

Real negotiations with the Shattered Cliffs clan start okay, but go rapidly downhill from there. Clarke talks to them until she’s hoarse again, figures out compromises, tries to see what the problems are, but there doesn’t seem to be one. They’re not obvious about it, and the faction who attacked them has been squashed, so it’s not them causing problems either. It feels like, she realises, attitudes towards them have turned, but no one will actually say _why_.

Eventually one of the children tugs on her sleeve when she’s stepped out for some air, and when she kneels down, the child points.

“They don’t like him,” he says. Clarke follows the line of his chubby fingers, and her heart sinks when she sees where he’s pointing.

“Why not?”

“Because he’s like Otcho,” the child tells her solemnly, and wanders off again. Clarke stays where she is, suddenly pissed off. If even the children know that the Grounders they’re trying to negotiate with are comparing Bellamy to the leader’s malformed hunting dog, they’ve got no chance of an agreement.

When she finds a quiet moment to tell Bellamy what’s going on, she think’s he’s going to do something stupid. His control is incredible, but everyone has a breaking point; this might be his. “I’ll be back,” he eventually says, gesturing for Clarke to go back into the hut to rejoin the talks.

Instead, she waits until he’s out of sight amongst the surrounding trees; distantly, she hears the sound of splintering wood. Only then does she go back inside.

When they get back to their own camp Bellamy pauses long enough to help Clarke relay their day’s conversations to the others, and then stalks off. Raven rubs her leg, winces when they hear a yell from Clarke’s tent. “I’m not dealing with that,” she says bluntly.

“I deal with him every day,” Clarke points out, because her patience is very thin right now, and she’s really not in the mood. Raven shrugs.

“Yeah, because you enjoy it. And besides,” she adds smugly, “he’s in your tent.”

“Great. Just my luck.” Raven pats her on the back and leaves, slowly walking over to the fire to join the others. Someone’s brought out a bottle of moonshine, but tonight Clarke doesn’t feel like getting buzzed and sleeping it off alone. Her own hand isn’t much company at night any more, but it’s preferable to the hangover, so that’s her evening. First, there’s the problem of Bellamy to deal with.

She ducks into her tent and almost screams, because one of the creatures is lying on the furs covering the dirt floor. It flinches, cowering down, and Clarke would give anything to not be paralysed with fear ever again. They watch each other for a long moment, Clarke frantically calculating how fast she can run, or how fast anyone else could get to her with a weapon. Then she realises there’s no sign of Bellamy, and no blood.

_Oh._

“Right,” she says, for lack of anything better. There’s a werewolf in her tent, and that isn’t even the weirdest thing that’s happened to her since they all hit Earth. “If you rip me apart during the night, I’m giving you so much shit when you’re back to normal again,” she tells it - him - firmly.

The animal blinks at her, then drops its head to rest on its paws - paws with very long, very sharp, sort of terrifying claws. Clarke tries not to think about that too much.

Instead she strips off her clothes, changes into the ones she keeps for sleeping in; when she turns back, she sees one eye shut quickly, like he hadn’t been watching her. Clarke snorts, settling into bed. “Subtle, Bellamy.”

She sleeps better that night than she has in weeks, even with the grumbling snores coming from her guest.

\----------------------------------------

The next morning, Raven comes to her tent while she’s still dressing, favouring her leg. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Raven says, lifting her eyebrows. “Why would anything be wrong?”

“You only turn up this early when there’s a problem,” Clarke points out. “Otherwise you wait for me to find you and ask for your help.”

“Gotta make sure you appreciate my genius.” She smirks, and Clarke busies herself with pulling her shirt over her head. “I notice you don’t have a guest any more.”

Bellamy had slunk out the back of the tent while it was still mostly dark outside; she hadn’t heard him change back, but from the look on Raven’s face, he wasn’t subtle about going back to his own bed. “It’s not what you think,” Clarke starts, finally dressed. Raven holds up a hand, still smirking.

“Believe me, I know. Genius, remember? I’m checking you’re alive and in one piece, not still having sex.”

Clarke blushes, but she can’t help smiling. “I’m fine. When did you figure it out?”

“I saw him a couple days ago. Trekked out to Pax to trade for some stuff from a bunker they found, and saw him going hunting. Looked kinda different.”

“Did anyone else see?”

Raven shakes her head. “They were all ahead, and trust me, they’d have mentioned seeing one of their leaders turning into a wolf-thing.”

“Good,” Clarke says, relieved. Raven expression turns thoughtful, like it does when she’s thinking about an impossible mechanical problem, or blowing something up.

“He’s got an edge now,” she says slowly. “And we need all the help we can get, surviving down here. Do you think we could have more people who could do that?”

“No,” Clarke says, flat and final. “Never.”

“You’ve thought about it.” Raven’s tone isn’t quite accusing, but it’s as close as she’ll get these days, without a better reason. Clarke shrugs; she’s a leader, and if some of the things she has to do are uncomfortable, like wondering if turning some of their people into werewolves might be a good tactic, then fine. She deals with it.

“I have, and the answer is no. Come on, Raven, how many people could control something like this?” She tilts her head at the other woman. “Did you see him turn, or just the result?”

“Both.” Raven shivers. “He doesn’t know I saw.”

“He probably does; his sense of smell is amazing these days,” Clarke points out, and Raven’s eyes widen. Then she starts to grin. “Shut up.”

“So he can smell you-”

“We’re not talking about that,” Clarke says firmly, and shakes her head when Raven smirk widens. “No more werewolves, no more talk about my sex life.”

“At least you have one,” Raven shoots back, but she shrugs, still grinning. “Clarke, if he’s dangerous-”

“Of course he’s dangerous-"

“You know what I mean, if he’s a threat to our people, then you have to be prepared for the consequences of that.”

“I am,” she says, sliding her jacket on, fastening her knife to her belt. “I am, Raven. We’ve already talked about it.”

Raven looks at her, considering, expression serious. Then she nods. “Okay. You’re dealing with it, I get that, can we deal with some normal problems now? **"**

“Bored of werewolves already?”

“I can’t fix that problem,” Raven replies, dryly. “Give me a zero G repair or a busted generator, and I’m your girl. Werewolves, not so much."

Clarke grins, slings an arm around Raven’s shoulders. “You’re always my girl.” Raven shrugs, trying not to show how smug that makes her.

Clarke ducks under the tent flap and follows Raven out, and catches herself smiling again as they walk through the camp together to get food, and start work on the day’s plans; she has some seriously good friends down here.

\----------------------------------------

Life gets- well, it doesn’t get much easier, but it doesn’t really get harder either. Clarke keeps patching her people up, Bellamy keeps himself mostly under control, and they manage. Once, when Octavia almost gets shot, he vanishes into the woods for an hour. He has a story about tracking the rest of their attackers, making sure they don’t come back, but Clarke can see the signs.

She goes to him that night, and they end up kissing furiously, Clarke shoved against a wall, her legs wrapped around Bellamy’s waist. She’s settled into it, skin buzzing with how good it feels, and then he breaks the kiss to lean back.

“What, what’s wrong?”

Bellamy’s hands are gone from her thighs, and she’s only held up by her legs and his chest pressing her back against the wall. He drops his head to her shoulder and groans. “I’m not- I don’t think we should do this.”

Clarke wriggles slightly, feels his hips jerk into her. “I’m thinking the exact opposite.”

“Clarke, I’m serious.” He lifts his head and looks at her, and _shit_ , his eyes aren’t entirely human. His arm shifts, and she hears the scrape of claws against the wall. “I could really hurt you right now.”

“Show me,” Clarke demands, because she’s just hit new heights of sexual frustration, and she wants to see- _needs_ to see. “Bellamy, show me.”

“You’re not serious.” Clarke stares him down, until he pulls a hand away from the wall and rests it, slowly and deliberately, on her breast. She knows he can feel how hard her heart is pounding, knows he can smell how wet she is, and he has to know that the claws aren’t exactly a turn-off.

Pretty much the exact opposite.

“You like that,” he says, sounding faintly stunned. “You’re- Clarke, this is kinda fucked up.”

She rolls her eyes. “I don’t want to fuck you because you’re a werewolf,” she tells him, sliding her hands up from his shoulders to tangle in his hair. “I wanted to before, for ages, but there was a always a reason not to, or we were always arguing.”

“We still argue.”

“And I still want you,” she says simply. Bellamy’s face loses the tenseness, and he’s just leaning in to kiss her again when the sound of raised voices has them both looking towards the gate. “Great.”

“They’ll work it out?” He suggests, shrugging. Clarke sighs.

“We’re the leaders here, we can’t just ignore it.” Clarke unwinds her legs and Bellamy moves back, hands gripping her hips to lower her to the ground. “Next time, we’re not stopping even if something blows up."

“You know you’re tempting fate, right?”

She leans up and kisses him hard, groaning into it when his arms wrap around her again. Somewhere someone yells again, and shit, for an instant she wishes someone else would take over leading their people, because she’s so turned on it almost hurts. But-

“Let’s go,” Bellamy says, pulling back and away. “Work to do.”

“What happened to leaving them to work it out?”

“We’re going to straighten out whatever the hell is going on,” he says, stalking ahead of her, “and then we’re having sex.”

“It’s a plan,” Clarke says, and hurries to get ahead of him; out of the corner of her eye she sees him sigh in exasperation, but even that can’t stop her smiling.

\----------------------------------------

It still takes a week for them to have sex after that, and Clarke thinks she’s going to go mad. There’s a thousand distractions to get in the way; they’re planning actual buildings for the winter now, forging alliances with the friendlier Grounder settlements, seeking out more bunkers marked on their old maps. All very useful and necessary, and exactly what Clarke should be doing, as a leader.

But in snatched moments between responsibilities they kiss until her lips are bruised and swollen, or she gets Bellamy on his knees between her legs, or gets to use her mouth on him, sucking him off until he’s shaking and relaxed. There’s no time for more, and it’s more than she’s had in a long time, but Clarke knows how good it’s going to be; hell, half the camp knows by this point.

Finally, at the end of a long day working on plans for winter-proof huts, Bellamy catches Clarke’s eye when she looks up from their rough drawings. Raven stops explaining a heating system she’s got ideas for, and throw her charcoal down. “Stop it,” she says, tone somewhere between laughter and exasperation. “I’m not having you eyefucking over my plans.”

“We still need to discuss the layout,” Clarke objects, because yeah, she’s craving this, but she’s also a bitch sometimes, so whatever. Bellamy’s eyes narrow. “And we haven’t decided-”

“Clarke,” Bellamy interrupts, mild and calm, “can I have a word?”

Raven shakes her head and doesn’t bother saying goodbye as they leave, already focusing on the plans again.

Her tent is dark, the air cool against Clarke’s skin when she strips off her shirt the moment Bellamy lets the door flap drop behind them. He’s on her in seconds, and they kiss hungrily, stripping each others clothes off. Bellamy lifts her and moves them over to her bed, presses her down onto it, and-

“Oh my _god_ ,” she groans, because it feels like he’s everywhere, hands stroking down her sides and up the insides of her thighs, mouth hot on her neck and her breasts, sucking and licking.

“You’re such a bitch,” Bellamy growls, against her stomach, “you _knew_ I could smell you, it drove me fucking insane.”

“That’s the idea,” Clarke laughs, breathless, his hands stroking heat into her like she’s never felt before. Getting turned on before he got bitten was fine, because he didn’t know, and she hadn’t figured them out yet, but now- Now it’s fucking _incredible_ , because she can make him shudder if she really gets herself going, especially when they can’t do anything about it.

Bellamy’s good with his tongue - “you’ve had practice,” she’d said once, and he’d smirked at her with all his teeth, said “all the better to eat you with,” and after she’d come so hard her leg cramped, he had to explain the fairy tale to her. Now she grabs onto his shoulders and arches her back to get closer, comes from his tongue and the fingers he curls inside her.

“More, more, come on, Bellamy-” She pulls him up, _needs_ to feel him inside her, cries out when he sinks into her _hard_ , wishes the bruises she knows she’s leaving would last more than a day on his skin. “Harder,” she demands, body on fire, but still craving _more_.

Bellamy pulls back to look at her, slowing down. “Ask nicely, princess.”

“Oh come on, you’re such an _ass_ -” She’s hyper aware of his hand pinning one of her wrists down, how swollen her lips are from their kisses, the solid, hot feeling of him inside her. Clarke shifts her weight until she’s pressed against him, his cock as far inside as she can get and so fucking good, tightening her legs around his hips to pull him in.

“That’s not nicely,” and _oh_ , his control frustrates her like nothing else on the entire Earth.

“Fuck me _please_ , Bellamy,” she snaps, and he smirks, does just that. She can’t breathe, never wants to stop, can’t believe they haven’t been doing this since they hit ground and started arguing.

He comes hard, still kissing her, and when he relaxes she rolls them over, sinks back down onto him and keeps going. Bellamy groans, eyes locked with hers until she tips her head back to concentrate on the sensation of him moving inside her. She’s drawing out her second orgasm, savouring the rush, and feels far too satisfied when she realises Bellamy is hard again.

“Is this an animal thing,” she asks, choking on the last word when he flexes his hips to fuck up into her as she rocks down.

“No,” he answers, and smirks, and she _knows_ there’s going to be a smartass comment there, so she sinks down heavily, rakes her nails over his chest to shut him up. His eyes go dark, and the hands covering her breasts are suddenly tipped with sharp points that dig in and send sparks up her spine.

She drags a hand down to link her fingers through his, clenches her cunt, loves the way his back arches when she does. He rocks his hips up to meet hers and moves one hand to her hip; he’s strong enough to keep her pulled close just like that, her clit rubbing against him until she arches up and back, coming so hard she can’t breathe and sees stars, Bellamy chanting her name over and over.

Clarke tips forward to kiss Bellamy until her lips feel bruised, his hand heavy on the back of her neck, keeping her close. She’s mostly asleep before she’s even rolled all the way off.

At some point in the night, Clarke wakes again; Bellamy’s hand is covering her hip, the claws digging in slightly again. “Everything okay?” She asks it quietly, knows he’s awake, knows he’ll hear.

“Yeah,” he answers, equally soft, but his voice is rough. “I can still smell you- us. It’s messing with my control.”

Clarke thinks she’s justified in being smug; that was some incredible sex, after all. “You need more practice,” she tells him, and slides a hand down his chest until he groans and has to move his hand to the furs beneath them, claws piercing through the hide underneath like it’s nothing.

\----------------------------------------

Making friends among the Grounders is exactly what they need - it’s necessary, vital to their survival and any chance at peace - but it can also be really, really boring. Life on the ground isn’t all fighting and survival situations; sometimes it’s just day-to-day living, and Raven might find talking about Grounder-invented technology endlessly interesting, but Clarke has her limit.

When she thinks she can leave without being rude she makes her excuses and steps outside, into the cool air. There’s a medical hut around somewhere, she knows, so she wanders around until she finds it, ducks inside to offer her help. To her surprise, there’s a familiar face sat by one of the rough beds.

“Hey,” she says, when Ankha looks up and notices her. “May I join you?”

“Of course.” The Grounder gestures to a rough wooden stool, and Clarke drags it over, glances at the bandaged leg of the man lying stretched out. “My brother.”

“What happened?”

Ankha rolls her eyes. “He’s an idiot. Forgot where he built a deer trap, walked into it himself.” She tilts her head at Clarke, the feathers in her hair different colours now, muted blues and greens. They remind Clarke of the butterflies Octavia had found, so long ago. “You’re a healer?”

“Yes.”

“That explains a lot.” When Clarke frowns, the other woman shrugs. “You always want the solution that doesn’t involve fighting. Usually, the people who want that are the ones who’ll be putting everyone back together at the end.”

Clarke laughs quietly. “I don’t think fighting does much good, most of the time.” The Grounder nods, and another woman, the healer Clarke was looking for, comes to their side; she speaks softly to Ankha, then turns to Clarke.

“Would you like to see the rest?” She asks, and Clarke agrees. They spend an hour or so discussing medical skills and local cures, and Clarke lets herself forget everything outside the little medical building; she might be a leader now, but she was a medic first, and she forgets that sometimes.

When the healer leaves to tend her patients, Clarke rejoins Ankha; she has questions. “Remember when we first met?”

“Of course,” Ankha says, dryly. They’ve met again since then, several times, but never mentioned the original circumstances. “You want to know more about the creatures.”

“We haven’t seen them since,” Clarke says slowly, carefully. “Are they likely to come back? Or will they have left?”

“They will have returned to their pack, I think.” Ankha shrugs. “We haven’t fought them for a long time, but they always fought in packs; no less than three. And as you killed one-”

“They left.” Silence, then Clarke asks, “did you ever hear about anyone getting bitten and surviving?”

“You don’t survive,” Ankhs answers sharply. “You become one of them, there’s no cure, no way to avoid it.”

Clarke sets her jaw. “Can’t it be controlled?”

For a long moment Ankha stares at her, and Clarke looks back, too-aware that if she backs down, the Grounder woman will leap to the right conclusion, and she’ll have put Bellamy’s life at risk for the sake of her curiosity. Finally Ankha sighs, turns away to fuss with the sheet covering her sleeping brother.

“My grandfather used to tell a story,” she says eventually, turning back to look at Clarke fiercely. “But it was only a story, you understand?”

“Of course.”

“He used to talk about a man he knew, who got bitten, when they were young and before they blocked off the pass through the mountains. He said his friend’s wife sat with him through the dark nights, stopped him turning all the way into one of the creatures.”

“What happened?”

“He still turned,” Ankha says quietly. “She kept him human for a while, but in the end the infection was too strong and he became of the creatures.”

“Has no one ever survived it?” When Ankha doesn’t answer Clarke leans forward, staring her down. “I’m curious. Those things attacked us, I need to know in case they come back.”

The Grounder shrugs again, still clearly reluctant. “We have stories about ones who managed to balance their human self with the wolf, but they’re just stories. Clans boasting about their fighting abilities because they’ve got a werewolf, whatever.”

Clarke turns that over in her mind. She can’t ask anything else; the other woman is already suspicious, and she can’t risk Bellamy for the sake of more questions. She stands up, puts the stool back where she found it.

“Thank you,” she says to Ankha, “I should be heading back.” She finds the Grounder healer and thanks her too, accepts the offer of returning to talk more about medicines that Clarke hasn’t come across yet. She’s about to leave when the Grounder warrior speaks again.

“Clarke.” Ankha’s voice is sharp, and Clarke turns back. “Don’t ask too many questions. There are people who would take curiosity as proof.”

“Proof of what?” Clarke says, and leaves before she can give anything else away. She has more answers, and even more questions, but what it comes down to is the fact that Bellamy is _still human_. Nothing Ankha said has changed that, or changed Clarke’s mind that they’re doing okay.

If he can’t control it, they know what to do. Until then, they keep it secret, use it when they have to, and protect each other. Same as always.

\----------------------------------------

One step forward, two steps back, usually off a cliff or somewhere equally nasty. Clarke knows things aren’t going to be easy for a long time, but sometimes she wishes they could all catch a fucking break. She hopes the rest of the group made it back to camp okay; the attackers had seemed focused on Bellamy, but hoping for a rescue means waiting, and there’s no time to do that. She’s hiding behind a tall rock, watching some kind of Grounder priest chanting around a bonfire, and Bellamy is-

Stripped down to bare his chest, the gash across his ribs healing already, slick with sweat and blood still. His arms are pulled back at an awkward angle, rope digging into his skin and fastening him to the tree. His eyes are closed; Clarke can tell he’s struggling for control, hands clenched into fists.

There’s a metal bar in the fire, one end glowing red-hot, and Clarke’s whole body goes icy cold for a moment when she realises what it’s for. She won’t let this happen, not again. She _can’t_.

The priest stops chanting and turns to Bellamy. “Animal,” he hisses, the crowd of watching Grounders drawing in closer. “You should have had your throat slit, not allowed to walk around _infected_.”

“I control it,” Bellamy says through gritted teeth, and even from across the fire she can hear him, always so fucking argumentative. “It doesn’t control me.”

“It will do,” the Grounder says, still so arrogant and smug. “And after tonight, your own people will kill you, like the animal you are.”

Clarke is- Clarke is pissed off, with everything, up to and including Bellamy, for no good reason. Seeing another one of her friends tied to a tree like some ancient sacrifice isn’t her idea of a good time, and she’s going to survive this. _They’re_ going to survive, just like they survive everything else.

Something cold touches her hand, and she flinches, looking down and away from Bellamy to see Raven, one finger to her lips against Clarke’s shock. “ _Here_ ,” she whispers, pressing the cold knife into Clarke’s palm. “Jasper’s taking care of the rest.”

The rest of _what_ , Clarke wants to know, and gets her answer when something blows up on the opposite side of the fire.

“Ohh-kay,” she says to no one in particular, and takes advantage slips of the confusion to Bellamy’s side. The priest has abandoned his torture to join the fight against Clarke’s people; they’re holding their own, Clarke sees, hopes they won’t be leaving anyone behind. Bellamy is breathing heavily, eyes shut tight; they snap open when Clarke taps him on the hip, focusing on her with a burning intensity. “If I let you go, can you remember which ones to kill?”

He swallows hard, eyes flicking from the melee in the background and back to her. “Anyone who isn’t you?”

Clarke- she’s got issues, she knows that, but Bellamy saying shit like that is her number one problem. Largely because it makes her really fucking hot. “Try again,” she says, holding the knife up. He tracks it, stares until he shudders, and there he is, her human Bellamy.

“I’ll remember,” he says, and she cuts him loose.

They join in the fight, and they’re evenly matched in strength, even with Bellamy fighting as a human, but the Grounders have more people, and it’s going to start showing. Clarke drags two of her people to safety in the dark forest, goes back for Chrin, down with an arm wound, and sees others fighting alongside her people.

Ankha is lashing out with a spear next to Jasper, and the short Grounder who wanted to kill them all is protecting Chrin and another guy until they’re back on their feet. Bellamy has gone, but in the shadows at the edge of the camp Clarke sees what’s she’s searching for. A darker shadow moves close to the ground; the priest-or-whatever screams as he’s pulled back into the trees, and two more Grounders with guns go the same way. None of them come back.

Afterwards, Clarke sends her people back with Raven and a guard from the Grounders who came to their rescue. She has to force Raven to go, but Bellamy isn’t back yet, and there’s no way they’re explaining this to more people than they have to if he comes out of the forest looking like an animal. She waits at the edge of the settlement for him, and isn’t entirely surprised to see Ankha walking towards her.

They wait in easy silence until Bellamy emerges from the darkness, still faintly wolf-like around the teeth. Clarke throws him the clothes he’d left behind, and he changes, gulps down the contents of the canteen Ankha passes him. Clarke looks at the other woman.

“You knew?”

Ankha smirks. “He’s a good liar; you’re a worse one.” She taps one end of her spear against the ground, considering. “He hasn’t killed anyone?”

Bellamy looks up, exhaustion in every line of his body. “Ripped a few people apart back there,” he says, the ghost of a smirk on his face. “But no one that didn’t deserve it.”

“Good,” she says, decisively. “We don’t like these people. Too close to reapers, and by choice. The bodies?”

Bellamy gestures. “Over there. Most of them, anyway.”

Ankha quirks an eyebrow at Clarke. “He’s a handful, I bet.”

“He’s a pain in my ass,” Clarke says, ignoring Bellamy’s smirk. Ankha nods and grins, then moves off, obviously as eager to be gone as they are. Or were, until Clarke takes a long look at Bellamy and lets the adrenaline in her body turn into something else. Bellamy’s head comes up again after a moment; she’s good at this, now.

“Clarke, don’t you dare.”

“What?” She presses her thighs together, shivers at the thrill that runs through her. This bit was obvious, and she’s amazed they never did it before he got bitten; adrenaline can mean fight or fuck, and their bodies work the same way. He pulls her to him and kisses her, hot and hungry and like there’s not several dismembered bodies lying around nearby.

“Right here?” Bellamy asks, hands catching hers when she goes for his belt. She looks at him, all but bares her teeth at his smirk.

“Yes right here, unless you want to wait,” she snaps, and leans up to kiss him hard, biting at his lower lip, because that- _yes_ , that makes him shove her into things, like a useful tree. Once, she’d never have done this, got naked in the middle of a forest and had sex, but she’d done a lot of things she never thought she’d do; at least this feels fantastic.

For all she knows Ankha and her party could be watching, but she doesn’t give a fucking damn, because Bellamy is _filthy_ when he’s hanging onto the threads of his control. His hand lifts one of her legs to wrap around his hip, then slips between her legs, where she’s so wet she can feel it on her thighs, _fuck_ , and he curls two fingers inside her without any warning.

“Right here then,” she chokes out, and Bellamy stops sucking marks onto her neck long enough to say, in a voice more like a growl;

“Want me to stop?”

Clarke braces herself against the tree, lifts her other leg to wrap around his waist, and bites down on the curve of his neck. He slides into her like they never stopped doing this, and she’s barely got her breath back before he’s fucking into her, fast and dirty, her nails digging into his shoulders so hard she knows she’s drawing blood. She wonders if he can smell it over the scent of them, wonders if it turns him on even more.

By the time she’s close she’s so fucking out of her mind that she can’t think straight, and Clarke comes with a scream that she only partially muffles in Bellamy’s shoulder, because whatever, they both like it loud when they can get away with it. He catches her mouth for a hard kiss when he comes too, hips fucking into her in short and sharp, sending aftershocks through her that make her never, ever want to stop.

\----------------------------------------

They start their building projects, that will make the winter much easier to survive, Raven comes up with a solution to the heating issue, and they have a lot of sex. Clarke and Bellamy do, anyway; she wouldn’t object to Raven joining in sometimes, but she doubts Raven would be as into the claws and occasional snarls as she is. _Maybe_ , though, and Clarke files that idea away for the nights when she’s alone.

She’s not alone now, but she’d welcome the extra distraction of a fantasy or two. The hut is tiny, barely big enough for her and Bellamy, her legs twisted up against one wall while the rest of her is lying flat on the dirt floor. Outside she can hear the ex-Reapers, minds warped by the drugs, the nastiest clan they’ve met yet.

They’d wounded her and slung them both in here; waiting for her to die or saving them for a game later, she doesn’t know and doesn’t care, nose full of the tang of blood. Her own blood, this time.

“I can’t leave you,” Bellamy says, hands pressing down on her abdomen. “And I can’t see a way for us to get out-”

“You can,” she says, breathing hard through the pain. “You could fit through the window.”

“No, I-” He turns to look, and when his whole body tenses up, she knows he’s caught on. “ _No_ , Clarke.”

“It’s the only way. You’ve done it before."

“That was different.” He’s a study in contradictions, to Clarke’s blurring senses; voice angry, expression scared, hands gentle and solid. “I can’t use it like that, I can’t let it take over.”

With a monumental effort, Clarke reaches up and grabs his collar, pulling him down. “If I don’t get medical help in the next half an hour, Bellamy, I’m going to die. You turning into an animal might be the only thing that can help us right now, so _please_. For me.”

For a long, long moment, he stares at her. Then he pulls her hand away from his shirt, takes her other one as well, and presses them both onto the wound in her side. She cries out at the pain and he leans down, kisses her hard on the forehead, then softer, on her mouth. She expects him to say something, but he just shrugs out of his jacket and _changes_.

It’s painful and if she hadn’t already thrown everything up, this would do it; there’s warping bones and crunching sounds, dark fur suddenly growing, and it’s nothing like the myths he’s told her when they’re in bed. It’s also over quickly, and then he’s gone, a shadow scrabbling up the wall and through the narrow window into the darkness outside.

Clarke lies on the floor and listens to the screams, and the snarls, trying to keep up the pressure on her side. If Bellamy hates her for this, then she’ll deal with that, like she deals with everything else. Clarke will do anything for her people, but she’s allowed to be selfish sometimes, and she really, really doesn’t want to die.

After some time the blood starts welling up around her fingers again, and she falls into blackness.

\----------------------------------------

“You told me half an hour,” Bellamy’s voice says, muffled. Clarke turns her head, feeling groggy and exhausted. “Raven says you should have been dead after ten minutes.”

“Bellamy?” She reaches out, clumsy. He catches her hand, presses it between his; his nails are thick, not quite claws but not quite human. _Stressed_ , she thinks muzzily, wonders why. “What happened?”

“You got in the way of a bullet,” he says, clearer now, and she vaguely remembers that; the flash and the pain, Bellamy’s hands covered in her blood. He leans closer. “Let’s get one thing straight, princess: only one of us can heal fast now, and it isn’t you.”

“You can’t take all the bullets for me.”

He leans over her, presses a kiss to her temple. “Yes I can. And I will, until there’s no one left who wants to kill us.”

_Fuck_ , she thinks, the edges of her vision going dark again, warm all over and satisfied with it, _he means it_. And then, before she falls asleep completely, _we can survive anything_.

****  
♥

**Author's Note:**

> Unbetaed, any and all mistakes are my own as usual. 
> 
> I have accepted my fall into this fandom, because nothing else would explain why I wrote +10k of werewolf fic. If anyone finds some sanity lying around, it's mine and I'd like it back, please. 
> 
> I hope someone enjoyed this...whatever this is.


End file.
